Introducing Raspberry Pi TV HAT, a new addon that lets you stream live TV

Yesterday the Raspberry Pi Foundation launched a new device called the Raspberry Pi TV HAT. It is a small board, TV antenna that lets you decode and stream live TV.

The TV HAT is roughly the size of a Raspberry Pi Zero board. It connects to the Raspberry Pi via a GPIO connector and has a port for a TV antenna connector. The new Raspberry Pi addon is designed after a new form factor of HAT (Hardware Attached on Top). The addon itself is a half-sized HAT matching the outline of Raspberry Pi Zero boards.

Raspbian Stretch (or later) is required for using the Raspberry Pi TV HAT. TVHeadend is the recommended software to start with TV streams. There is a ‘Getting Started’ guide on the Raspberry Pi website.

Watch on the Raspberry Pi

With the TV HAT can receive and you can view television on a Raspberry Pi board. The Pi can also be used as a server to stream television over a network to other devices. When running as a server the TV HAT works with all 40-pin GPIO Raspberry Pi boards. Watching on TV on the Pi itself needs more processing, so the use of a Pi 2, 3, or 3B+ is recommended.